hi, everybody, i'm maria bartiromo. the final days before the election. we'll talk to two former white house economic advisers about what the candidates policies mean for america. the devastation of superstorm sandy, the impact it could have on the economy and what happened at the new york stock exchange that hadn't happened in more than 100 years. the changing way we deal with and learn about crises, the perils and power of social media. "wall street journal report" begins right now. >> this is america's number one financial news program, "the wall street journal report." now maria bartiromo. >> here's a look what's making news as we head into a new week on wall street. a positive jobs report and labor department reporting that the unemployment rate ticked up a notch in the month of october to

7.9%. but 171,000 jobs were created in the month well above expectations. numbers for the last two months were also revised upwards and 84,000 jobs added for august and september. new york's mayor michael bloomberg rang the opening bell at the new york stock exchange after a two-day shutdown because of superstorm sandy. that's the first two-day weather related shutdown at the new york stock exchange since 1888. the first day post storm trading was a slow one but no glitches. the markets had a triple digit gain with the dow then fell on thursday. breaking a four-month winning streak, the nasdaq had the worst october since 2008. auto sales slowed in october partly affected by sandy. ford rose .4% and chrysler rising 10% and toyota up 16%,

all below expectations. and if you're one of the people who lined up for the star wars movies the first time around, you'll like this. the force may be with disney. the company is acquiring lucas films from george lucas for $4 billion. it has plans to make another 7th chapter in the series by 2015. there is so much to talk about this week from the final days before the presidential election to the economic impact of superstorm sandy. joining me now are two former presidential advisers, austan goolsbee, profess of at the booth school of business and former adviser to president obama and ed lazear, former adviser to george w. bush. thank you for joining us. >> nice to be with you. >> great to see you both. let's start with the jobs numbers on friday. the last jobs report before the election. what do they tell us about america's economy today and what impact do you expect it to have on the election.

austan? >> i don't think it will have much impact on the election because it's not that much different from the overall trend over the last year to 18 months. i think it was a fairly solid number but certainly better than what was expected and you got revisions on the jobs number itself. but overall, growth has been relatively modest in the u.s. and that's reflected in the jobs number. so this is an encouraging month but you never want to make too much out of any one month. >> i was surprised at the numbers. ed, what do you think? >> i think there are good things that each candidate can take out of it. obviously the fact that the unemployment rate ticked up is something that governor romney will emphasize, it's higher than when the president took office. that's the headline number. but i agree with austan, the fact you had 171,000 jobs this month and i would even add to that, it's not just this month, it's the trend for the past couple of months is higher, about 170,000 for the past

couple of months. and that's a good sign. the one thing i would say is that while that's better than the average, the number of jobs created per month since the turnaround in early 2010 has been about 140,000 per month. this is a little bit better than that. the one disadvantage of it is that you need about 119,000 per month just to keep pace with population growth. what this means is that even with 170, you're adding 50,000 per month and if you play that out, it would take 13 years then to make up for the jobs lost during the recession and still keep pace with population growth. >> what about sort of on top of all of that and let's talk about the superstorm sandy, a terrible human and personal toll. what impact does it have in the economy, both in the region and across the country? ed? >> well, storms obviously have a big immediate effect but if you look at the storm, even a storm as great as katrina, which was obviously devastating to an

entire region and probably greater in terms of its impact than the current storm, you did see it in the numbers during that one quarterback in 2005 but the rebound was extremely quick. so you can barely see the effect of the storm in gdp numbers after that. and the one nice thing about our economy is it does tend to be able to recover quite quickly. >> austan, what's your take? on top of everything you have this gas problem as well. everybody wanting gasoline and unable to get it. >> my mother-in-law is out in new jersey, she got her power back on thursday. i was happy that she was okay. i think just the way we do the numbers has got goofy implication that your house gets knocked down, you rebuild a new one, you're no better off than you were before but that counts as an increase to the gdp because they are counting the part you're doing right now, not what was already there. >> what about the infrastructure

story, governor cuomo said when new york rebuilds, it will rebuild better. is this an opportunity to make significant changes to the infrastructure in new york and new jersey? and of course then the question becomes, if so, how do you pay for it? does the money exist? >> that's the key. that's what i was going to say. you could take this as a moment to make a decision to upgrade the economic infrastructure of the tri-state area, but then the question is, well, with what money? because that's not going to be cheap to do. i think people are going to have to make some decisions about that. >> ed, we did see, which was actually a positive this week, we saw a degree of bipartisanship, president obama touring the damaged area of new jersey with new jersey governor chris christie the key note speaker at the republican convention, both of them heaping praise on each other. does this tell you compromise is possible in washington or was that just politics? >> i think compromise is always

possible in washington. you know, it's standard in any kind of negotiation, including negotiations in business between management and unions for things to go down to the 11th hour, that doesn't mean things are falling apart. it's the nature of the game, way it's played. our government has managed to get through many, many crises and despite the rhetoric and despite the hostility, we do tend to get things done eventually. it would be a lot nicer if people were more civil to one another, but the reality is the government is actually pretty effective in the long run at getting things done. i'm always an optimist on this and i think we can do it. >> we know you two disagree on a wide range of policies from taxes to the role of government. where do you find common ground? what do you agree on? austan? >> eddy and i have been friends for a long time. it's funny, we were together a few days ago and thinking about that exact subject. i thnk we have pretty broad

agreement on tax reform, if you're going to do tax reform in 2013, what form should it take and how would you broaden the base and lower rates and try to increase growth in the country? i think we've got a lot of agreement on that. >> what about you, ed? >> i would say that's right. one of the things where we shared common views was on the way of the financial crisis was handled for the most part. we can disagree about some of the details but for the most part the bush team and what the obama team did to follow it were pretty much on the same path. there were differences in terms of how big the stimulus should be and whether there should be a s stimulus, we did agree and there was a role for government. there's a role for regulation. i would have a slightly more cautious eye to regulation perhaps than austan. but we agree on views on international trade. we both think that's extremely important in terms of growing the economy and think fiscal

consolidation is necessary. we might differ slightly in terms of how much on the tax side and expenditure side but the basic points i think are not ones on -- >> great to talk with you both. we appreciate it. >> nice to be with you. >> austan goolsbee and ed lazear. >> up next, it's the final hours before decision day 2012. america is voting. the man who correctly predicted much of the 2008 outcome on what the numbers say this year. "the new york times" nate silver will join me. how social media came into its own during sandy. what it means and how we connect. take a look how the stock market finished the week. back in a moment. if you think running a restaurant is hard,

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welcome back, he's been called a master of predictions, nate silver is the statistician famously led to a near perfect forecast of the 2008 election. his work accurately called the outcome of 49 out of 50 states and every senate race in contention. his 538 blog named for the total number of votes in the electoral college and new book "the signal and the noise." so many predictions fail but some don't. thanks for joining us. >> thank you. >> just a few days before the election day and your analysis of the polls given the president a better than 80% winning re-election, is that right? >> that's right. we've had him at 80% for the past couple of days here. really just because we're at the point where the polls are not likely to change very much.

they are still uncertainty there, margin of error. the fact the president leads in the polls in ohio and iowa states where you would need -- he would need to win electoral votes means he's the favorite on tuesday. >> walk us through the key states that have the probability to swing the election. what's the data about ohio? >> ohio has a 50/50 chance of having the decisive vote on its own. it's very hard for romney to have a winning path without ohio. he would have to win some other state in the midwest like wisconsin, for example, or iowa, and then run the table in colorado and virginia and so forth. we go through all of the math and it seems complicated but the fact is that obama has been ahead in almost all of the polls in ohio by two or three points. that holds up more often than you would think. you have an 80% chance of winning the state if you have a lead into election.

>> so much of your book focuses on the inability to plan accurately based on forecasts ranging from economic indicator to hurricane warnings. what's your take on this week, hurricane sandy and final jobs report? >> this was predicted very well, four or five days in advance they forecast it would barrel into southern new jersey as it does and have a very severe storm surge. it's a real triumph for science in some ways as well as a human tragedy. i think the jobs report on friday was a decent number as austan said, nothing game changing though. but you don't have anything that i think that would cause numbers to shift back toward romney at the last minute. usually when we have news that's kind of real crisis type environments like hurricane sandy, the incumbent president

is able to look presidential and it tends to help him. i think this has not been a terrific closing week for romney necessarily. at the same time, it's close enough that if it were predicted he would win already, i don't think it would disrupt it very much. >> i was looking at the headlines you made this week because of political blogs. you bet joe scar borough a cash charitable donation that barack obama would win. you're such a numbers guy, was it appropriate to play the political game? >> i don't going to make a comment on correct journalistic standards. it's very natural for me where you have a view or belief and think the odds are in your favor, then it's an honorable thing to put money down on it. i'm not sure if yts the new york times would agree with that point of view necessarily.

>> i guess the question is, how can we trust your model. there's been so much discussion over the polls and so much subjectivity, you yourself have said that polls are subjective and you were an obama supporter in 2008. >> i think i try to provide scientific objectivity. and looking at as a math me tigs and looking at numbers in baseball and poker and other fields. i think journalistic objectivity is a more he said she said kind of thing. maybe people in that field have trouble understanding we're looking at history and math and data to guide our view of the race and that we're telling you that we might be wrong. we're telling you what the odds are we'll be wrong. we have a pretty good track record. if you have an approach looking at data in an objective way like an investor watching the show might, the political coverage that we get instead tends to take a more -- it's a lot more subjective in some ways to kind

of spitball things and say i feel like this would be a close election or romney will come back instead of looking at what the people actually say in the polls. >> nate great to have you on the program. >> up next, in the dark but not totally disconnected. how social media kept many informed and talking during the storm. look for us on facebook.com/mariabartiromo. ...you see they all have something very interesting in common. they have teachers... ...with a deeper knowledge of their subjects. as a result, their students achieve at a higher level. let's develop more stars in education. let's invest in our teachers... ...so they can inspire our students. let's solve this.

as sandy made landfall this week, many people stayed up to date on news through social media. joining me now is john steinberg. >> good to be here. >> on any normal day your site offers what stories or ideas are viral. tell us what that picture said while sandy was hitting landfall and what it has been saying since the storm? >> well, it was amazing. on the day of the storm, when it really hit, we ended up getting 2 million unique visitors, people seemed to be at home by and large having internet connectivity looking to share what was going on in their various neighborhoods. many of the most credible reports of what was going on, areas flooded, where damage was occurring, was happening on social media. it was really a pivotal moment for triter and facebook, not

unlike the arab spring was and spreading that information. >> for so many who lost power, a working smartphone was the only way to get information. >> that was remarkable to me. how many pictures and how much information we were having and operating our company, how many employees were able to work in lower manhattan even as the power was out and water was out. cell towers kept on cooking basically. >> that's amazing. having access to so much information in the palm of your hands changes the way we experience major collective events and it is continuing to change. >> we have a saying that mobile is social. we get about 30 to 40% of our traffic in any given month -- just hit, people were already in tune to getting and sharing on mobile. it was second nature. which is why there was so much information exchanged. so many sites did such huge problem leading up to when the waters hit the island. >> your site and so many others

online, news and opinion sites, they are knocked off line monday. how were you able to keep working? >> we weren't fully knocked off. the backup generators got flooded. we have an enormous portion that is in the cloud. people could still reach the site by and large. and then what we also all of our team went to tumbler and social media to get out the story. we believe content in media has been at omized into discreet units. we don't worry where they are, as long as they are getting out there. now we're fully back up in the cloud since the morning after. >> and buzz feed takes a pretty light hearted tone normally covering celebrity stories and animal pictures -- >> we actually have an enormous amount of quality. ben smith, we have probably some of the most indepth political coverage out there right now. people covering both campaigns,

style vertical, food vertical. we track billions of events going on every single month. we have massive data bases and those have continued to capture data throughout the storm. however, the servers that actually process the data, those our team had to go into a building in the dark in lower manhattan and carry servers down 25 floors at 3:00 a.m. last night and move them into a new facility in connecticut. >> let me ask you about some of the bad information out there. not all of the use of social media sites during the worst of the storm was with the best of intentions, buzz feed reported about a twitter user that posted false story, that the floor of the new york stock exchange was flooded. i knew it wasn't. should this man be brought up on any charges? >> it amazing social media has a reputation for spreading false information, but false information spreads quickly and

corrected quickly on social web. we were the ones that revealed on a tumbler blog that this individual was a manager of a republican congressional campaign and thought he had anonymity, we revealed who he was and ultimately ended up in him having to apologize and give up his post. i think social media, it spreads quickly, negative and correction. >> good to have you, thank so much. >> thank you, maria. >> up news, we'll look at the upcoming news this week and pretty penny for america's most famous address. what's the white house worth in today's housing market?

follow me on twitter and google plus. now a look at the stories in the week ahead that may move the markets. corporate america tries to get back to business, earnings are expected from disney, kohl's, whole foods and groupon and as well as the new york area power provider con ed. on tuesday it is judgment day, the election. on thursday we will find out if the u.s. imports or exports more goods with the international trade balance and on friday consumer sentiment. the white house has seen a jump in its housing value. a market price of $284.9 million. a slight increase from four

years ago. real estate site zillo made the estimate taking into account the washington neighborhood surrounding pennsylvania avenue and tax assessments of other homes nearby. it boasts 16 bedrooms and 35 bathrooms and plent tif charm. that will do it for us. next week the story continues and the work begins, we'll have reaction to the 2012 presidential election and look at what the president will be dealing with. each week keep it here where wall street meets main street. have a great week, everybody, i'll see you next weekend. ♪ ♪ [ male announcer ] they are a glowing example of what it means to be the best. and at this special time of year, they shine even brighter. come to the winter event and get the mercedes-benz you've always wished for, now for an exceptional price. [ santa ] ho, ho, ho, ho! [ male announcer ] lease a 2013 glk350 for $399 a month

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